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Tangipahoa's fracking attitude much healthier than St. Tammany's: James Varney

Fracking in Tangipahoa Parish

Tangipahoa Parish residents and government have embraced oil drilling, a far cry from what has been happening in St. Tammany Parish.Friday July 11, 2014. Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
(Photo by David Grunfeld, Nola.com |The Times-Picayune))

Rhoden's trip through Tangipahoa Parish uncovered few people distraught at the prospect of more energy and personal enrichment. Those dumb hicks, runs the tenor of some responders.

Why, if they only knew how awful fracking really is. If they only knew how the planet teeters on the edge of catastrophe, then they would simply shut up and go back to the hardscrabble, often unrewarding agricultural life many of them tell Rhoden they are delighted to move beyond.

It's as if the Khmer Rouge was trying to set our energy policy.

"But why not mortgage your kids' future for a little cold hard cash now?" asks Ya_Herd_Meh, a nom de guerre that might be right at home in some genocide docket. "The best I can hope for is that when that well is poisoned, you guys drink enough of it to die first."

Well. When the enlightened ooze such passionate intensity how dare a bumpkin farmer in Kentwood take issue?

The idea finding and extracting energy is without risk is nonsense. That's probably why no one actually advances it save those who pretend it is the position of their opponents. But the fact accidents will happen is not a reasonable or valid reason to oppose energy production.

But a disaster or two over the years coupled with a steady dose of hysteria serves those who seem more at ease with Year Zero than 2014 well. Not only do the anti-energy zealots ignore the entire history of energy exploration to make their isolated examples more potent, so, too, do they seem strangely or inhumanely ignorant of the fact more, cheaper energy is good, not bad, for all.

Especially the poor. Indeed, no one will be hurt more by half-baked ideas like turning the clock back on our energy production than those who either don't have or can't afford the energy available to the forces set against it.

A bizarre situation, to be sure, but one upon which the contrasting views of fracking in Tangipahoa and St. Tammany parishes sheds much bright light.